Thread by @jpaulreed

A friend recently asked me "Hey, this @REdeployConf thing you're doing sounds pretty interesting... but I'm not sure whether it's for me."

"Well..." I replied...

THREAD:

First some context: I had the original idea for bringing people together to talk about resilience in technological systems last year, during my first year in my Human Factors and Systems Safety masters.

I spent a lot of time thinking about what people like @jesserobbins and @adrianco (and others) have talked about for a long time about what building resilient technology looks like, and what it meant in the context of the safety science lens we were looking at it through.

And then with the rise in the popularity of the #ChaosEngineering community, @CaseyRosenthal, @KoltonAndrus, and @nora_js reignited a lot of those discussions and put a spotlight on the technology that points out where our systems need to be more resilient.

But in my masters program, we were also spending a lot of time looking at the people in the system. (They don't call it 'socio-technical' for nothing!) These conversations had been lovingly stoked by @allspaw for years.

And people like @markimbriaco , @jasonhand , and @UberGeekGirl have all pushed the edges of the frontier on how our industry thinks about people-in-our-systems.

The irony being: for all the pride tech has in its innovation, there's still a lot of very traditional thinking. (Human error, anyone?!) So those conversations have been happening for the past few years.

Of course, teams are made up of people... and in recent years, the role of individual-in-the-system, and how we reason about patterns that are bad and patterns that are better have popped up (in the wake of severe burnout).

@courtneynash made sure we knew about this at Velocity.

And there was a period you couldn't go to a DevOps Day without @botchagalupe holding an open space on Karōjisatsu (and that was both amazing and long overdue). It's a scary, difficult topic, and one that's weirdly easy to totally ignore AND ALSO be debilitatingly front-of-mind.

@mary_grace, @aspleenic, and @gitbisect have kept reminding us: it's not an issue that's gone away. And unless we can incorporate deliberate solutions into our systems, it's not going to go away.

It's time we got these groups together in the room. Resilience Engineering, in the safety sciences, isn't a new concept. But it _is_ an emergent concept... and when it comes to "What does resilience engineering" mean for the technology industry, we don't have a good answer.

We should work on that. We NEED to work on that. Because if we don't answer it ourselves, someone else in society will.

And we may not like their answer.

So that's what @REdeployConf is about.

And it's why, if you care about any of these topics AND you care about the socio- part of the system as much as the technical-part of the system, @REdeployConf is right up your alley.